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Yesterday's post on ExxonMobil (2/17/08) highlighted that it had
funded the Frontiers of Freedom and its Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP link ) during 2006, contrary to its claim that it was not
funding global warming denialists. You may wonder about the
context in which ExxonMobil made this claim.

Remember last year when the IPCC 4th Assessment
report came out – the Guardian wrote a story about American Enterprise Institute
soliciting result-oriented denialist analyses of the IPCC report and that
report included information about ExxonMobil’s funding of AEI. Guardian 2/2/07 Report. During conversations in late January and early February, 2007 with me and other bloggers, Maria
Surma Manka from Green Options [Giant Part I Post; Giant Part II Post], Jesse Jenkins from Watthead[ExxonMobil Posts],
Tom Yulsman from Prometheus[Post on earlier conversations -- I can't recall whether Tom participated in the February call, but I believe he did], Stuart Staniford from The Oil Drum [ExxonMobil AEI Post], Ken Cohen, ExxonMobil’s Vice President for Public Affairs
had assured us that ExxonMobil was no longer funding controversial denialist groups like Competitive Enterprise Institute and it did not fund AEI with the intent that they engage in denialist analyses. The first conference call occurred in late January and the second on the same day that the Guardian
story and the IPCC report came out.

Cohen spent considerable time before the IPCC report came out in January 2007 trying
to convince us that ExxonMobil was changing its Neanderthal stripes, truly
accepted that anthropogenic global warming was a serious problem, and was ready
to take a responsible role in the future discussions of how to reduce GHG
emissions. Admittedly Cohen did that in the truly diplomatic way of saying that
ExxonMobil had not effectively communicated its position that anthropogenic
global warming is real and that GHG emissions need to be reduced.

During the February call, Cohen
knew that the Guardian’s report about ExxonMobil’s funding of AEI and AEI’s
alleged solicitation of result-oriented denialist analyses threatened to
undercut public perception of ExxonMobil as a responsible actor. Indeed, those reports ended up on CNN. So, Cohen went
out of his way to schedule this call about the Guardian’s
allegations.

As
Maria recounted that discussion:

“We had no knowledge that this was going on,”
insisted Cohen. He explained that Exxon funds a lot of different groups, and
“when we fund them, we want good analysis." Exxon does not condone what
AEI did, but Cohen confirmed that it does continues to fund AEI, although other
groups like the Competitive Enterprise
Institute are not funded by them anymore.

Cohen assured us that Exxon is “trying to be a constructive
player in the policy discussion and not associate [themselves] with those that
are marginalized and are not welcome in that discussion.” The IPCC report “is
what it is,” and Exxon does not believe in engaging in scientific research that
preordains an answer. Cohen:

…that's the issue with AEI: Are they preordaining an
answer?…I can understand taking a market approach or a government
interventionist approach, but this is not a question of trying to find who’s
right or who’s wrong. Let’s let the process work.

But, I asked, how can you grant AEI nearly two million
dollars (n.b. slsmith -over the entirety of AEI operations, not annually) and not
know what they’re doing with the money? Turns out that Exxon conveniently funds
the “general operations” of AEI, not specific programs that would allow them to
track how the money is being used. Perhaps Exxon needs to think hard next time
before it funds an organization so clearly disinterested in constructive
solutions.

Cohen was consistently explicit in Exxon's
position that global warming is happening and mainly caused by human
activities. If that is true, then how will Exxon fight the huge misperception
that it’s still the planet's largest naysayer? Cohen conceded that the company
needed to do a better job of communicating its position on global warming,
rather than allowing a fact sheet or
news release on their website to do the work.

Cohen kept telling us that the 2006 contribution report was coming out, but
declined to give us any specifics about ExxonMobil’s contributions to AEI or other groups, but he said Competitive Enterprise Institute was no longer funded. Cohen
continued to defend AEI as a responsible, albeit very conservative, think tank
doing legitimate policy research. And frankly, I supported him on that score
during the calls because at least some of the work done by AEI is just that. And I was not nearly as skeptical as others about ExxonMobil's protestations of innocence. See my post on the AEI matter ELP Blog Post on AEI

As the quoted material above indicates, Cohen in early
February 2007 led us to believe that ExxonMobil was no longer in the denialist
camp and did not condone AEI soliciting denialist analysis (if indeed that’s
what they had done). He claimed that ExxonMobil no longer associated with
marginalized denialist groups. He suggested that the 2006 report would indicate
that ExxonMobily had disassociated itself from the Competitive Enterprise
Institute, which brought us the classic, sadly humorous “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution, we call it
life!” TV commercials. You tube link to CEI Energy
commercial.

From
this discussion, it seems clear that Cohen knew precisely which “public
information and policy research” organizations that were funded by ExxonMobil
during 2006. Yet, while he perhaps sat with the 2006 report in front of him and
refused to release its contents, the 2006 contribution report later showed that
in 2006 ExxonMobil provided $ 180,000 to Frontiers of Freedom and the CSPP, the policy center it created with ExxonMobil's funding several years ago. P.S. Cohen denied funding CSPP in an e-mail today, but unless my sight is failing: CSPP is reported as the Science and Policy Center under Frontiers of Freedom Download 2006 ExxonMobil's "public information and policy research" contributionsIf that’s not supporting denialists and associating with marginalized
denialist groups, I don’t know what is!

Take a good look at the high quality analysis of global warming that CSPP provides:

(2) Dr. Ball's The Science Isn't Settled powerpoint
presentation - Dr. Ball is the Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship
Project which describes its first project on understanding climate change as
"a proactive grassroots campaign to counter the Kyoto Protocol and other
greenhouse gas reduction schemes." NRSP describes Dr. Ball as the "lead participant in a number of
recent made-for-TV climate change videos, The Great Global Warming Swindle."

(3) Joe Daleo's Congressional Seminar on global warming in
March 2007 devoted to disputing the IPCC's report and arguing that
anthropogenic global warming from greenhouse gas emissions are not a real
problem.

(4) CSPP's May 2007
rebuttal of Al Gore's testimony, which suggests there is no scientific
consensus that CO2 emissions are causing global warming

(5) a nonsensical piece on "Gore's Guru," positing that because Dr. Revelle, who died in 1991, had cautioned in 1988 and 1991 against drawing rash conclusions about global warming might still take that position. I call it nonsensical because Dr. Revelle suggested that we wait 10-20 years to see if the trends continued. We've waited and now we've answered that question: between 1998 and 2008 we witnessed incredibly dramatic global warming and the scientific community has spent the last 10-20 years studying whether indeed human-caused GHG emissions are responsible for much of that warming. We and ExxonMobil know its answer to that question.

Obviously, the blogosphere is not the only group worried about ExxonMobil's funding choices. Britain's national academy of scientists, The Royal Society, in September 2006 took ExxonMobil to task about its funding of denialist groups. Royal Society letter

Well,
maybe ExxonMobil finally pulled the plug on FF and its “Science and Policy”
center in 2007 (and so Cohen was just tap-dancing around the embarrassing, but
not on-going, reality of funding denialists). Although, FF's CSPP might survive: it apparently does have funding from two major tobacco companies!

Maybe ExxonMobil has rethought its policy on funding organizations whose primary contribution to the climate change discussion is to distribute continued attacks on those who conclude that the current state of climate science supports an effective policy to reduce GHG emissions. I’d like to think so – but we
won’t know until ExxonMobil releases its 2007 contributions report. I requested that Cohen release it to me; he declined.

However, even if it had
defunded FF and CSPP (and other denialist groups), I’m not sure I’d believe that ExxonMobil hadn’t found new denialist outlets to fund.

If
the Guardian and other media or the blogosphere produce a big enough stir on this story,
perhaps it will. But I am astonished that, just as it was selling itself as a
responsible player on global warming, ExxonMobil would act so irresponsibly and
so deceptively. And I am deeply embarrassed at my naievete in believing what
Ken Cohen and ExxonMobil were selling about ExxonMobil’s born again conversion
to a responsible position on anthropogenic global warming.

Watch out, though, ExxonMobil knows that the question is no
longer whether global warming is real, but what to do about it. You can bet it
is smart enough and devious enough to fund a lot of “public information and
policy research” that will muddle policy discussions about global warming
legislation and may assure that not much is done to regulate GHG emissions from oil and gas and that what is done doesn’t cut hardly at all
into ExxonMobil’s astounding profits: $41 billion for 2007 and almost $ 12 billion in the 4th quarter of 2007 alone. ExxonMobil profits post

I have a modest suggestion for ExxonMobil: do not fund organizations whose published information, analysis, and research on global warming or climate change has primarily sought to undercut the conclusions reached by the joint statement published in 2005 by 11 national academies of science, including the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, India, Brazil and China . That statement is linked here: Joint Science Academies' Statement: Global Response to Climate Change

Unless and until ExxonMobil stops funding the sort of stuff that Center for Science and Public Policy is peddling, I hope
that the new President and Congress will not believe a single word that is said
about global warming policy by ExxonMobil or any of denialist and anti-regulatory "public information and policy research" organizations it funds.